When someone gets your name wrong, it hurts. Our name is an important part of our identity, both for the construction of self and for recognition by the outside world. Mispronouncing a name is erasure and a painful reminder of the “otherness” that people outside the Anglophone world — the infinitely biased arbiter of what constitutes a “difficult” name — suffer the most from. Miswriting a name is erasure all the same, and it feels especially humiliating when it comes not from error-prone people but from “perfect” computer systems.

NYU’s computer systems cannot handle any character outside the 26-letter Latin script. For an institution that chose two countries with entirely non-Latin writing systems — the UAE and China — to host its portal campuses, this is an inexcusable shortcoming. Diversity is a key theme of NYU’s messaging. But failures such as this show that the university seems to care more about quantifiable diversity — as they tout the number of countries and languages the student body possesses year after year — than meaningful inclusion.

The result of this systemic carelessness is a constant stream of microaggressions that anyone whose name does not conform with the Anglophone naming orthodoxy has to deal with. The systems ask me my name, and I write down Máté Hekfusz, time and time again. There is no room for ambiguity or misinterpretation here. That is my name. But the systems disagree. “Invalid characters,” they cry. The most gracious ones let me through if I shave off those pesky accents from my first name. “Mate Hekfusz,” my NYU ID reads. “Are you Mate?” asks the Public Safety officer. No, I am not. But I cannot say that.

Other systems simply crumble when faced with those two little lines. The Symptom Checker grants access to my dorm to a certain M√°T√© Hekfusz. Probably a distant relative. All my Student Assistantship offers go to Máté Hekfusz. These offers are meant to be official, binding documents, to be signed by both employer and employee, but good luck to any court trying to find this Máté. And I am one of the lucky ones — still identifiable through my comfortably Anglophone and unique last name. Many are not that fortunate.

Having my name misrepresented and mangled by official university sources tarnishes my sense of belonging and cuts against the core of my identity. It makes me feel like an impostor, a foreigner in an English-dominated world. It makes me confused and distressed, wondering if, for example, I will ever get in trouble for not using my “passport name,” even though the system does not allow me to input it. It also leads directly to various mispronunciations of my name by people who rely on the systems to inform them. While I make an effort every time to correct them, this is exhausting and a struggle that my peers whose names fit into the Latin script do not have to go through. I should not have to go through it, either.

Screenshot supplied by Máté Hekfusz.

This should not be a problem whatsoever, and the fact is that it only makes the pain of erasure more acute. Unicode, the leading standard for digital text representation, included numerous non-Latin alphabets in its very first version in 1991, and today it includes almost all known writing systems. UTF-8, the format that encodes almost all Internet content today, also includes a wide range of characters. If NYU used these standard formats, there would be no problem: since they cover thousands of non-Latin characters, everyone’s names could be stored and presented accurately. Yet the institution is still stuck with the archaic ASCII system, which makes no sense from a technical standpoint, given that systems have evolved to include more characters.

Even if there were no inclusive, universally adopted standards available, NYU should still have gone the extra mile. The university proclaims its diversity every chance it gets, welcoming thousands of students from non-Anglosphere countries with non-Anglophone names. It welcomes them, yet it fails at even such basic tasks as getting their names right.

Its failure is especially ironic in the face of other measures it is implementing in the name of diversity. For instance, Albert allows you to specify not just your pronouns, but also the exact pronunciation of your name. Clearly, the leadership is aware of the harms caused by name erasure. So why haven’t they upgraded their systems yet? While the implementation might require significant structural change, that is no excuse to continue subjecting students to feelings of otherness and discrimination.

None of your creative interpretations is my name. I am not Mate, not Maita, and especially not any of the garbled messes your malformed code outputs. My name is Máté Hekfusz. It is time you got it right, NYU.